Popular Screendance in Egyptian Golden Era Cinema: An Analysis from the Perspective of Pierre Bourdieu
摘要
This chapter aims to show the utility of Pierre Bourdieu’s sociological thought to discuss current issues toward historically discriminated dance practices, because I find that Bourdieu’s concepts provide a useful theoretical framework with which to frame prospective research of object dance genres, such as bellydance, in academia. Although Bourdieu has been deployed by previous research in dance studies, such as Gay Morris’ (Dance Research Journal, 19(2), 52–82, 2001) article on Martha Graham and Steven P. Weinright, Clare Williams and Bryan S. Turner’s article on ballet (2006), Bourdieu’s relational sociology and main thinking tools have been elsewhere little deployed in dance research. Particularly, within the realm of screendance, which is the academic niche I am going to debate below, Bourdieu’s thought has been very little referenced as a main thinker. Given the weight of current social media in the production and distribution of dancing bodies worldwide, I argue that Bourdieu’s theories are useful to conceptualize the reproduction of social inequalities via dance within this new realm.